Data, such as messages to be transmitted, can be modulated into symbols of a complex symbol constellation. Because each complex symbol can represent multiple bits, complex symbol constellations can increase transmission efficiencies over systems using symbols that represent only one bit. De-mapping complex symbols to, for example, log likelihood ratios suitable as inputs to modern forward error correction decoders can involve many complicated calculations and thus be computation intensive or require large look up tables that occupy large spaces in digital memories.
Some embodiments of the invention use sectoring to reduce the number and complexity of computations for de-mapping a received symbol from a complex symbol constellation. Some embodiments of the invention thus address one or more of the above-identified problems in the prior art and/or provide other advantages.